Plagued by deficits, communities everywhere must now decide between tax
reform and public spending cuts -- between economic life and death. And
thanks to two Western bellwether states, we know what each choice means.

As a venue for political experiments, the sprawly GOP enclave is as
pristine a conservative laboratory as you'll find in America. If the
city has garnered contemporary notoriety at all, it has achieved infamy
for domiciling right-wing groups like Focus on the Family and infecting
the world with viruses like Douglas Bruce -- the father of draconian
initiatives that seek to prohibit governments from raising levies.

When the Tea Party movement's anti-tax activists refer to the abstract
concept of conservative purity, we can turn to a microcosm like The
Springs (as we Coloradoans call it) for a good example of what such
purity looks like in practice -- and the view isn't pretty.

Thanks to the city's rejection of tax increases -- and, thus, depleted municipal revenues -- The Denver Post
reports that "more than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs
will go dark; the city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team,
burglary investigators, beat cops; water cutbacks mean most parks will
be dead " recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools (and) museums
will close for good; Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends;
(and) the city won't pay for any street paving."

Meanwhile, even with the Colorado Springs Gazette
uncovering tent ghettos of newly homeless residents, the city's social
services are being reduced -- all as fat cats aim to punish what
remains of a middle class. As just one example, rather than initiating
a tax discussion, the CEO of The Springs' most lavish luxury hotel is
pushing city leaders to cut public employee salaries to the
$24,000-a-year level he pays his own workforce -- a level approaching
Colorado's official poverty line for a family of four.

This is what Reaganites have always meant when they've talked of a
"shining city on a hill." They envision a dystopia whose anti-tax fires
incinerate social fabric faster than James Dobson can say "family
values" -- a place like Colorado Springs that is starting to reek of
economic death.

Choosing life, by contrast, means doing what Colorado's governor and
state legislature are doing by temporarily suspending corporate tax
exemptions and raising revenue for job-sustaining schools and
infrastructure. Even more dramatically, it means doing what voters in
Oregon did last week.

As deficits threatened their education and public health systems,
Oregonians confronted two ballot initiatives -- one modestly raising
taxes on annual income above $250,000, another hiking the state's $10
minimum corporate income tax.

Despite these measures exempting 97 percent of taxpayers, conservatives
waged a vicious opposition campaign, trotting out billionaire Nike CEO
Phil Knight as their celebrity spokesperson. But this time, the right's
greed-is-good mantra failed. In a swing state that had killed every
similar initiative since the 1930s, voters backed the tax increases --
and chose economic life.

No matter where we live, this same choice will soon face us all in some
form. It is a choice embodied in President Obama's pragmatic initiative
to end his predecessor's high-income tax breaks, a choice for which
future local and federal elections will serve as proxies.

Inevitably, anti-tax zealots will attempt to obscure what this choice is about -- but the choice is now crystal clear.